Why dig out your iPhone when you can re­view mes­sages on your Mac?

Push no­ti­fi­ca­tions on your iPhone are great on the go, but less con­ve­nient when the de­vice is tucked away while you’re work­ing on your Mac. Us­ing lowen­ergy Blue­tooth, No­ti­fyr prom­ises to beam those mis­sives straight to your desk­top, re­duc­ing the need to reach into pock­ets or bags just to keep up­dated.

No­ti­fyr has two com­po­nents. A paid-for iPhone app in­ter­cepts Push no­ti­fi­ca­tions on the de­vice, and an OS X pref­er­ences pane serves this data to No­ti­fi­ca­tion Cen­ter. Launch the iPhone app, pair it with your Mac us­ing a four-digit PIN code and no­ti­fi­ca­tions be­gin to flow onto any re­cent (2011 or later) Mac.

By de­fault, No­ti­fyr du­pli­cates ev­ery no­ti­fi­ca­tion on your Mac, but you can si­lence in­di­vid­ual apps to avoid rep­e­ti­tion. For ex­am­ple, Face­book and Twit­ter al­ready have their own OS X no­ti­fi­ca­tions, so there’s no need to re­peat them by beam­ing mes­sages from your iPhone to the desk­top. How­ever, this can only be done af­ter No­ti­fyr has de­liv­ered at least one no­ti­fi­ca­tion from an app, rather than dur­ing ini­tial setup.

As handy as No­ti­fyr is, we ran into oc­ca­sional con­nec­tiv­ity prob­lems while run­ning it along­side Knock, a Blue­tooth LE util­ity that en­ables un­lock­ing a Mac from the iPhone. If you’re away from the Mac for too long, No­ti­fyr some­times fails to re­con­nect, al­though the de­vel­op­ers are mov­ing quickly to stomp out such bugs. Over­all, it’s a use­ful and com­pe­tently de­liv­ered app that’s bound to get even bet­ter over time. JR Book­wal­ter

Launch the app, en­ter a four-digit PIN to pair over Blue­tooth and you’re done!